Former Microsoft CTO Creates Exclusive $80 App for iPhone/iPad

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Nathan Myhrvold is a former Chief Technology at Microsoft back when the company’s CEO was Bill Gates. Now, Myhrvold is co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, as well as the principal author of Modernist Cuisine which he now brought to the iOS world for $80

Normally, a Windows-oriented website like ours wouldn’t run such a story, but I think it’s an interesting, and ironical one that our audience will find interest in. Nathan Myhrvold (try and pronounce that) is a former chief technology officer at Microsoft that loves both science and food. He is the principal author of a six volume foodie encyclopedia, called the Modernist Cuisine.

It is also one of the most expensive cooking encyclopedias, the original six volume version retailing for $500, with the two-volume that followed after that selling for $115. Now, Nathan and his team have transformed their huge food encyclopedia into an iPhone/iPad app. It’s not just a digital book, but rather an expensive $80 interactive app that can do more than just provide recipes.

The interactive digital cookbook is the fruit of a development team of 10-15 people that have worked over nine months on the project. The contains 37 technique videos, 416 recipes and 1,683 photos. It’s a smart cooking app where, as Daniel Eran Dilger with AppleInsider puts it:

the recipe cards dynamically adjust the measure of ingredients you’ll need to yield a given number of servings, then add these items to a shopping list.

Obviously, the Modernist Cuisine app is much more suitable to be used on the iPad, than the iPhone. Matt MacInnis, the founder and CEO of Inkling, the publishing platform used to deliver the iPad app said the following about Myhrvold’s intention:

His concern was around usability. He has an insane attention to detail. The notion he’d do this on a normal ebook reader wouldn’t do justice to the work he’d put into it.

Among the top features that the Modernist Cuisine app comes with are the high-resolutions pictures and the ability to search within the app’s own information which will also fetch extra data from Wikipedia and other web services.